The military component of the PRC-DPRK Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance is now largely symbolic, a Chinese national security expert told the Asan Plenum in Seoul on Tuesday.

The decades-old treaty – approved in the wake of the Korean War in order to deter an attack on the DPRK – must be renewed by the two countries every 20 years, with the next renewal scheduled for 2021.

But Zhu Feng, director of the Institute of International Studies at Nanjing University, said that far from having any value as a collaborative defense mechanism, the “treaty between Pyongyang and Beijing appears (to